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The great thing about getting a hosting account is that in perhaps 99.9% of cases it comes with email capabilities. That means you can setup a certain number of email accounts. Each such account can have a certain size, meaning it can hold X MB of data.

Web based email is email capability, but with a twist: you can read/send emails using a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla (Netscape) etc.

A few programs are used to intermediate the access to the emails through a browser. Among the more common are NeoMail, Horde and Squirell Mail. Certainly, there are differences between them. For the average user however, besides the look, the functionality is similar.

Email can be managed in faster, more advanced ways. For that purpose certain email specific protocols were created. By using these protocols, certain programs provide you with an easier and faster way to read, store, delete and send emails. Among the more known software are Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird.

For retrieving emails, the following protocols are the most common: POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). I'll tell you from the start that my favorite is IMAP. I've used POP in the past until I learned about IMAP and found it much better.

there is a small, but important difference between IMAP and POP. When using POP protocol, by default, the emails that are on the server are moved to your computer. With IMAP, the emails are downloaded on the client machine, but by default they are not deleted from the server. This means that you can re-read those emails on any computer at a later time, by accessing them on your server.

POP and IMAP are used to retrieve and manage our emails, but to send emails another protocol is used: SMTP or Simple Mail Transport Protocol. SMTP is now a part of almost any hosting package.

PS:
I am running some blogs on JustHost, a WordPress Web Hosting recommended by WordPress. You can visit my JustHost Review for reference.